Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Society made me do it

For an organization that supposedly stands for personal responsibility, church leaders ought to reject the findings of study that take blame avoidance to a whole new level while sounding like something straight out of a Newt Gingrich speech.

Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice begrudgingly get around to the notion that perhaps the church hierarchy may be somewhat culpable by not adequately training priests who were then allowed to exist in a climate of social isolation and job stress.

So why then is the priesthood apparently the only segment society -- around the world -- to have a significant problem with child sexual abuse? Certainly other professionals raised amid the increasingly "deviant behavior" of the era don't have a problem on par with the Catholic Church or even other religious denominations..

Were the authors of this study -- commissioned by the Catholic bishops of the United States -- the allegedly impartial academic arbiters they were supposed to be? If so, why did they change a commonly held definition of pedophilia?